Did this fucking spic every write anything insightful...

He always arrives at something. You are just not seeing it, or not reading it the way the text demands you to read it.

openculture.com/2015/03/jorge-luis-borges-personal-library.html

Borges is telling me to read these books. Is he a patrician?

First, read Borges.

>He always arrives at something.

And that something is usually airy and intangible. Borges is an "idea guy" but not a true philosopher.

it's insightful if you read it properly. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is about the nature of literature and how it changes the way we see the world, Pierre Menard and the Library of Babel are essentially Barthes' Death of the Author essay but more fun, The Lottery In Babylon is an exploration of how people attempt to assign a meaning the ordinary operation of chance in the real world, etc.

He also writes a lot about knife fights and gauchos.

None of those are "insightful", it's just him stating his opinion.

What the fuck does that even mean? Do you want him to give you a fucking rock or what?

Borges evidently is not a philosopher, nor he ever claimed to be one. It seems that you are reading him with expectations that do not belong there.

No, you are just not a good reader.

There are literal books about Borges' books. Studies of his themes, allusions, and mathematical concepts.

if you want to throw racist slurs around and cry about how it must be bad writing because it couldn't possibly be your infinite wisdom, go for it, it'll just be another night on Veeky Forums.
Or you could read.

>if you want to throw racist slurs around
You and OP should both head back over to reddit where you belong

It means all his fiction never amounts to much more than flimsly thought experiments.

>Maybe someone built this library. Maybe they didn't, lol.

Yeah. Real deep.

>There are literal books about Borges' books.

There are books about a lot of dumb shit. Doesn't prove the subject has any intrinsic value.

Interestingly enough we read him as a short story writer and not a philospher, because he wrote short stories and not philosophical treatises. Shockingly difficult to comprehend I agree

>what is fiction?

> just Twilight Zone episode summaries and essays about shit that never happened?
>just him stating his opinion

are these both you? those are two completely different things and Borges is neither. the reason he's so great is that he writes his opinions/insights (I don't get why you think opinions can't be insightful, either) in stories with atmosphere that makes them more memorable and better demonstrations of his ideas than simply staying them would be.

never been.

>There are books about a lot of dumb shit. Doesn't prove the subject has any intrinsic value.
yeah it's almost as if you have to read them and develop informed opinions or something what's the deal here

cry some more faggot

It looks like Borges is not your kind of author. But it's not Borges fault, nor it is yours. Try reading something different, but do not demerit or disregard him just because what interests you is not the same thing that interests Borges.

He dealt a lot with the nature and the possibilities of fiction, of the act and process of writing, and of influence in literature and philosophy. His insights seem ethereal to you because of their subject matter, not because they lack "insightfulness", or actual importance.

bart asjaksd

He writes stories with the pretense of conveying some deeper meaning, but fails to deliver.

He takes simple conceits that would be better communicated as brief summaries in larger essays then makes up a bunch of fake references.

What is the intrinsic value in a book about celebrity gossip?

>It means all his fiction never amounts to much more than flimsly thought experiments.

what's so flimsy about them? do you just hate thought experiments in general?

What "deeper meaning" are you even referring to? Seems to me that you just don't understand what Borges is about, and so you just disregard him as if it were nothing

>He writes stories with the pretense of conveying some deeper meaning
No, he writes stories because he fucking enjoyed writing stories, if he had wanted to write philosophy he certainly would have

>He writes stories with the pretense of conveying some deeper meaning, but fails to deliver.

tbqh I think you're the one failing to pick up what he's delivering. which is OK, he's just not for you I guess.

>it's an OP doesn't know how to read episode

You talk about how Borges is flimsy and such, but you shitty talk about such vague concepts as "deeper meaning" and "insightful" stuff seems pretty airy and intangible.

I understand the cheap symbolism, doesn't mean I have to be impressed by it.

Everyone here just falling for the b8. It hurts to watch.

It's not meant to impress you, dumbass.

It's not cheap either.

OP is just trying to make Veeky Forums do the work on explaining Borges to his pleb friends

It's OK to not understand something and then ask people more knowledgeable/immersed in the subject about it. It's not OK when you don't understand something and then blabber about it like a goddamn retard, asking why people like it while simultaneously disparaging the subject itself. But this is Veeky Forums, so it's no surprise.

The insight of his pieces doesn't strike you because many of literary/thought experiments and ideas he explored in his fiction have been re-done and parodied by visual media ad nauseam since they were published. Of course they don't seem original now. But if you can't still enjoy them for what they are, that's your problem.

He's the only Argentine that ever got off his ass and did anything

jk, OP is a faggot who has no skill at reading and Borges is GOAT

>many of literary/thought experiments and ideas he explored in his fiction have been re-done

my favourite example of that is how something almost exactly like The Garden of Forking Paths was proposed as an interpretation of quantum mechanics. I don't know if Borges was an influence on the many-worlds interpretation, and he's never acknowledged as far as I can tell, but he anticipated it by more than a decade.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

I don't think it's a great interpretation of quantum mechanics, personally, but it's taken seriously and quantum physics is weird enough that it's not totally ridiculous.

That's another way people try and defend Borges, by overstating his importance.

Multiverse theory existed long before he did.

aeon.co/essays/can-the-multiverse-explain-the-course-of-history

>implying pop science isn't a phenomenon that hasn't just emerged within the last decade

My favourite Borges (of the ones I've read, which aren't too many) is actually a much more normal, straightforward story- The Gospel of Mark, IIRC.

My biggest problem with Borges is that his stories have the psychological depth of a chicken McNugget. He is a philosophical writer, full of ideas (some examples here ), but he has no memorable characters.

Look at Funes. His only attribute is "wow I remember everything", and though Borges pulls up some interesting philosophy alongside that, Funes as a character is still empty in the end.

Most main characters in Borges' stories are just empty placeholders, just a requirement to keep the story going. It's an anonymous shadow looking out into strange worlds. What can you tell me about the protagonist of Tlon, Uqbar..., of Pierre Menard..., of The Lottery in Babylon? Absolutely nothing.

Compare that to the characters you find in Faulkner's short stories, Chekhov's, Maupassant's. Those are real, living, breathing characters. I don't even want to bring up Proust's characters because it would be unfair comparing a novel to short stories, but you get the idea.

Borges was an excellent writer, don't get me wrong, but he was very limited in the things he could do.

That's because in his mind the books, legends and labyrinths that men made were more important than the men themselves. That's why Borges portrays Homer as a troglodyte and bases his fictional biographies on what the subjects wrote, not who they were.